Magnetic doodle, drawing toys are popular drawing toys because such drawing toys are clean, easily erasable, and inexpensive. With a magnetic stylus, a child may draw or write on the drawing surface leaving no mess of crayons, markers, paints, etc. A child may also easily erase the drawing surface by sliding the magnetic eraser and begin another drawing or writing over and over. An example of such a magnetic doodle is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,143,472, entitled “Displaying Magnetic Panel And Its Displaying Device.”
Another example of a magnetic doodle, drawing toy includes one or more stencils. The stencils serve as guides to assist a child, particularly a young child whose drawing or handwriting skills are yet to be developed. The stencils may contain a rich variety of objects, from simple dots, lines and curves, to shapes such as circles and hearts, to figures such as cartoon characters, animals or flowers, to language or mathematics symbols such as letters and numbers, etc. A child may produce their drawings and handwriting on the drawing surface by tracing along trace paths, such as indentations or cutouts, of a stencil that is laid upon the drawing surface.
However, such a magnetic doodle, drawing toy provides limited educational value and may have limited success in retaining a child's interest since such a toy is unable to provide the child with feedback about the objects on the stencils. In particular, a child may lose interest in drawing with such stencils if they do not understand what is depicted on such stencils.
Another magnetic doodle, drawing toy addresses some aspects of the above problem. In particular, such a drawing toy includes a stencil set, wherein each stencil in the set has identification tabs. Control electronics of the drawing toy may identify the stencil laid upon the drawing board based upon the identification tab of the stencil. The control electronics may then tell the child about the objects on the stencil based on data stored in its memory. For example, when a stencil of a monkey's face is used, the control electronics reads the identification tab and realizes that the stencil depicts a monkey's face. The control electronics may then provide the child with audible feedback about the depicted object. For example, the control electronics may generate an audible signal that states, “This is a monkey.”
Although such a drawing toy may provide more educational value and achieve more success in retaining the child's interest, such a drawing toy is still limited due to the toys lack of ability to interact with the child while the child is tracing along the trace paths of a stencil.